Hey, guys: Jennifer Lawrence is not as dumb as she makes you look

Yahoo News recently offered this flash: Jennifer Lawrence is sexy. That was information I had to pass along via social media, and soon the post had several likes—and one comment that made me scratch my head.

“But she is still stupid.”

The guy who said this is smart, accomplished and a student of pop culture, but my subsequent hasty and incomplete search of the Internet turned up no evidence whatsoever in support of his statement. In fact, if winning an Oscar and starring in three movies that gross more than half a billion dollars in one year, making you the “top money-making star,” is an indication of stupidity, I wish she’d start spreading her lack of understanding through webinars.

The search also directed me to several interviews in which Lawrence came off as rather bright, including one in which she admitted to having once felt dumb.

“When I entered high school, the light went out,” she told Before It’s News.com. “I had friends, but I did not feel smart because I was not a good enough student.”

A psychiatrist told her she suffered from social anxiety, but the remedy wasn’t Adderall or Ativan. It was acting. “I begged my parents to take me to a casting in New York,” she said. “Just on stage, my mother saw the change that was taking place in me. She saw my anxieties disappear.”

Again, how stupid does a person have to be to figure out how to cure a condition that medical doctors cannot?

Still pondering the mysteries of the response to my initial post, I experienced the serendipity of watching an episode of the TV show Mind Games,in which a team of professional brainwashers need to convince a frumpy middle-aged guy to apply to be CEO of his company. They decide to send in a hot young woman posing as a corporate headhunter.

How is that supposed to work, you ask? According to the human behavioral scientist played by Steve Zahn, the poor guy’s endocrine system will overload his brain with he-man hormones, stripping him of his ability to reason and replacing it with a need to impress the woman by taking foolish risks.

You know the axiom: “A man’s intelligence decreases in relation to the size of the breasts of the women he’s talking to.” I’m here to tell you that breast size alone isn’t the issue. Hell, the mere proximity of a woman can strike a man dumb; whether she wears a Maidenform DD underwire bra or fits comfortably into a Bali B-cup is not an issue.

This, ManWARriors, is scientific fact. “Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman,” begins an article from Scientific American magazine. “In many cases, the potential suitor acts foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly, and according to new findings, it may not be.” The study found that just telling men a woman they could not see would observe them via webcam tanked their scores on cognitive tests.

The study also found that men did worse only when they thought women were watching, while women did the same no matter who looked over their shoulders. You may think this makes men sound stupid—but consider this: If women weren’t impressed by men acting like idiots, the trait would have been culled from our gene pool eons ago.

On the other hand, a picture of a gorgeous woman accompanied the Scientific American article, forcing me to read the damn thing two or three times to figure out what it was saying. I’m still not sure I got it a hundred percent right.

But one thing I do know for sure is that Jennifer Lawrence is not stupid. And if you’re a guy who says she is, that that’s your endocrine system doing the talking.